How dinosaurs coped with slippery slopesA new investigation of a fossilised tracksite in southern Africa shows how early dinosaurs made on-the-fly adjustments to their movements to cope with slippery and sloping terrain. Differences in how early dinosaurs made these adjustments provide insight into the later evolution of the group.The research, conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan, Argentina's Universidad de Buenos Aires, and the Iziko South African Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, will be published online Oct. 6 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

French fossil hunters have discovered huge dinosaur footprints, said to be among the biggest in the world.The footprints were made about 150 million years ago by sauropods - long-necked herbivores - in chalky sediment in the Jura plateau of eastern France.The depressions are about 1.5m wide, corresponding to animals that were more than 25m long and weighed about 30 tonnes.

For the second time in a little over a year, Yemeni scientists have discovered dinosaur footprints in Yemen. The latest trackways, dating back 140 million years, were found in bedrock 35 km outside Sanaa.The Yemeni team also found fossilised ferns between and around the villages of Darafat and Bait Al-Jaled in the district of Arhab in Sanaa governorate. The sites are located just around 2 km west of the main road from the capital Sanaa.

A three-toed dinosaur which once roamed the Isle of Skye may have been the same species as one whose prints have been found in the Red Gulch mountains in Wyoming, palaeontologists said yesterday.The 170 million-year-old tracks are so similar that Glasgow palaeontologist Neil Clark believes the Wyoming dinosaurs may have swum or waded over to Skye - which at that time was part of an island off the east coast of America.US scientists now plan to put his theories to the test, using 3D mapping technology to compare both sets of footprints.

Researchers at the Catalan Institute of Palaeontology (Universitat AutÚnoma de Barcelona and the Catalan Government) and the University of Manchester have travelled around Spain and Portugal to scan and document the best preserved dinosaur trace fossils.This May, the Catalan Institute of Palaeontology (ICP) and the University of Manchester have once again begun to work on documenting dinosaur trace fossils (imprints) in the Iberian Peninsula. For two weeks, the team formed by palaeontologists from the two institutions will be working on different sites located in La Rioja, Soria, Teruel and Asturias using laser scanning techniques. Their work will include sited such as Los Cayos, Era del Peladillo, El Frontal, Cerradicas, TereŮes and La Griega. This is the continuation of the work they began this past December when the team documented three sites in Portugal using laser scanning techniques.

Fossilised dinosaur tracks found at a dump in Oxfordshire have been put on display for the first time.The tracks, which were unearthed at Ardley Quarry and Landfill Site in 1997, have gone on show at the new Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock.Experts believe the tracks in the limestone were made by Megalosaurus and Cetiosaurus 170 million years ago.

Footprints found on Skye and in Wyoming, in the US, were left by the same dinosaurs or a similar species, recently-published research has found.Dr Neil Clark, of Glasgow's Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, said some tracks at the two sites were "indistinguishable".Great Britain and the United States formed part of the same land-mass hundreds of millions of years ago.

Bolivian farmer Primo Rivera had long wondered about the dents in a rocky hill near his home. Palaeontologists solved the mystery this month: they are fossilised dinosaur footprints -- the oldest in Bolivia.The fossilised footsteps that intrigued Rivera for two decades are thought to be about 140 million years old, much older than other dinosaur prints found in the Andean country.

Namibia did have dinosaurs, and the last remaining testimony thereof, the footprints on Farm Otjihaenamaparero, are protected by law.Secondary roads D2404 and D2414 off the Okahandja-Otjiwarongo main road lead to the signpost of farm Otjihaenamaparero.This farm is world famous for the dinosaur footprints that occur in sandstones of more than 200 million year old Etjo Formations that accumulated under even drier conditions than is now experienced with winds blowing in from the Namib Desert.

University of Utah geologists identified an amazing concentration of dinosaur footprints that they call 'a dinosaur dance floor,' located in a wilderness on the Arizona-Utah border where there was a sandy desert oasis 190 million years ago. The three-quarter-acre site - which includes rare dinosaur tail-drag marks - provides more evidence there were wet intervals during the Early Jurassic Period, when the U.S. Southwest was covered with a field of sand dunes larger than the Sahara Desert.Located within the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument, the 'trample surface' (or 'trampled surface') has more than 1,000 and perhaps thousands of dinosaur tracks, averaging a dozen per square yard in places. The tracks once were thought to be potholes formed by erosion. The site is so dense with dinosaur tracks that it reminds geologists of a popular arcade game in which participants dance on illuminated, moving footprints.